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Graciousness

When I think of people who seem to embody mindfulness, something they share in common is the quality of graciousness. There is a sense of fluidity and grace to how they engage with the world – they’re not barging through the day lost in self-centred pre-occupations. They allow space for people around them and don’t use up all the oxygen in the room. At the same time, they interact with a sense of presence, not hiding behind false modesty.

Graciousness could be described as ‘good manners with a heart’ – there is a sense of courtesy, but also warmth and care. One of the many meanings of mindfulness, of course, is to be ‘mindful’ of someone else’s needs, to treat them with respect and consideration. What comes through is an attitude of caring both for others and also oneself.

We get a sense of someone’s character when they are gracious under pressure, such as a sportsperson who is gracious in defeat, or someone who has been on hold for forty minutes and still manages to be reasonably polite to the person on the other end of the phone. Many a first date has probably been ruined when something went wrong with the meal and the dinner companion was rude to the waiter. It is challenging to be gracious when we’re exhausted, hungry or very stressed. Yet some people seem to manage it, and we can all be grateful for them when life gets chaotic.

To graciously acknowledge a mistake and make amends; to concede someone else is right and you were wrong; to look out for another passenger after the plane has been sitting on the tarmac for seven hours without moving – all these small moments have a ripple effect into wider society. None of us gets it perfect all the time, and even the Dalai Lama admits to being grumpy occasionally. To me, it feels more like an underlying mindset than a particular formula for how to behave in given situations.

At a deeper level, graciousness can be about how we approach life – whether with a sense of grace and flow, or else with the mentality that life is a battle we have to power our way through. There may be times for standing one’s ground and not yielding – but most of the time, an attitude of openness and goodwill is likely to be more productive, and allows a greater sense of possibility for ourselves and for those we interact with.

Mindfulness practice idea:

It is difficult to feel gracious when we’re rushing around. Take a moment to slow down and notice someone who is being gracious – perhaps giving up their seat on the train, offering a friendly smile in the shops, or showing a willingness to gracefully compromise for the greater good. Notice the sense of expansiveness in that interaction, and how it feels in your body.

Uncertainty

‘The first thing that arises when we open up to each other is a great sigh of relief. We realise that we’re not the only one who feels bewildered.’

Pema Chödrön

Australia is currently heading towards an election campaign, and the media is full of politicians who are trying to sound convinced that they are the only ones who have all the answers to the complex problems affecting this country. Of course, no one person can be an expert on everything or have the solution to all our challenges, but to express uncertainty on any issue would be considered political suicide. We may cringe when we hear politicians sound like a ‘know-it-all’ as a result, but in our own lives, how comfortable do we feel with uncertainty? It’s not usually a pleasant space to spend much time in. Yet as the social psychologist Erich Fromm has written:

‘The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.’

Uncertainty can open us to curiosity and wonderment. It is always refreshing when a teacher or presenter is asked a question they don’t know the answer to, and instead of becoming defensive, their face opens up in delight as they exclaim,

‘Now, that is a really interesting question!’

When we approach uncertainty as an opportunity for further exploration, it becomes a place of creative possibility. A songwriter doesn’t know what the song will sound like before she starts writing, just as the artist is faced with a blank canvas. Creativity can be just as much stilted by great success as by miserable failure, when the desire to reproduce the success means the artist is no longer willing to delve into the unknown.

Some uncertainties are very difficult to bear – when we’re waiting for the results of an important medical test, or are no longer sure if our partner wants to be with us, or have lost contact with a family member. Uncertainty like this can cause a lot of suffering, and we can’t just offer glib assurances to someone in these situations.

Yet even our more ordinary everyday life is filled with uncertainty – we never know what the next moment will bring. We can respond by becoming paralysed with anxiety, or else being rigid and exuding an air of being overly confident. As Yeats wrote in his famous poem ‘The Second Coming’:

‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.’

Somewhere in the middle between those two extremes there is an opportunity of acting with agency and confidence, while at the same time being open to having our viewpoint and solutions challenged by new learnings. In mindfulness meditation, we often develop a greater sense of trust in ourselves, in acting from our values and inner knowing. Yet most meditation, by its nature, tends to also take us to places of uncertainty for what can seem like a very long time. This can be frustrating, but also liberating.

The voice of uncertainty is more quiet than the booming sound of pompous conviction. What it lacks in charisma, however, it more than makes up for in authenticity.

Mindfulness practice idea:

Set aside ten to twenty minutes with the intention of deliberately sitting in uncertainty. Perhaps there is a topical issue you can’t make up your mind on, or there is an area of uncertainty looming in your current life. For the set period of time, try not to come up with any solution. Notice how it feels in your body, as well as emotionally and mentally, to simply sit with this uncertainty.

Creating joy

‘Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.’ Thich Nhat Hanh

We all know how galling it is when we’re going through a difficult time, and someone exclaims to us in a bright voice, ‘come on, smile, it’s not that bad!’ It’s not likely to cheer us up – if anything, it can make us feel even grumpier!

On the other hand, we can sometimes hold on to a mood for longer than we need to, through our body posture, the expression on our face, our ruminative thoughts, and behaviours which aren’t going to help us feel any better.

For example, we might have had an upsetting phone call, and for the next few hours we walk around with an annoyed frown on our face, with our shoulders tense, our breathing fast and shallow, and our thoughts caught up in replaying the conversation and what we should have said and will say next time and so on. These are all natural responses, and it makes sense to try and process what has just occurred, and to plan our next steps.

However, it’s easy to become stuck in this way of being. We might feel exhausted after a day of this and so we spend five hours in the evening watching some shows on TV we’re not even enjoying, and eating too much and becoming annoyed with ourselves and the TV shows and life in general. We sleep badly and wake up with a stiff neck and feel even more badly done by. In the meantime, all kinds of potentially pleasant interactions and experiences might be around us, but we’re not available to them. Our disgruntled mood becomes a habit rather than a short-term response, closing us off from the possibility of moving beyond the annoying phone call and embracing what life has to offer us right now.

In her wonderful book ‘Smile or die – how positive thinking fooled America and the world’, Barbara Ehrenreich describes the dark side of a relentless focus on being positive. She gives the example of a worker who has been laid off, and when he doesn’t find a new job immediately, he is blamed for not being positive enough – as if a positive attitude alone were enough to conjure up a job in a depressed employment market which no longer values his skills and training. The smile Thich Nhat Hanh talks about is very different to this – it’s not a smile which ignores the reality of our current situation and our struggles, or pretends that through the power of our mind we have complete control over our lives and can be happy all the time.

Rather, Thich Nhat Hanh’s smile gives us choices about how we engage with each moment. Sometimes, the simple act of lifting up our head, relaxing the shoulders back and smiling can help us to feel better, to be more hopeful. It also opens us up to positive interactions with other people. Like the children’s song says so beautifully,

‘When someone smiles at me, I feel like smiling too.’

Mindfulness practice idea:

For the next week, try to deliberately smile at least once a day – taking the opportunity to pause for a moment, take a breath, and gently smile. What do you notice in your body, and in your mind?

Anja Tanhane

Connecting with our creativity

One of the delights of working with young children is their unabashed joy in being creative. Whether it’s music group or drawing or dress-ups or story time, the children are right there, lively and engaged. For too many adults, however, creativity has become something they no longer have time for, or are not ‘good enough’ at, or feels childish to them. As a music therapist, I’ve often heard people say ‘oh, you wouldn’t want to hear me sing!’ To which I always reply, of course: ‘I would love to hear you sing!’

Sometimes it’s only through tragedy that people find their way back to creativity. I’ve worked with stroke survivors who were members of an aphasia choir. There was so much joy in that choir, despite the terrible circumstances they were dealing with. Other times, people in hospital or recovering from trauma might work with an art therapist, and find new ways of expressing themselves when words can seem inadequate. Creativity can help us to express our more difficult emotions, and it can also be a wonderful source of joy. Whether we’re belting out a tune in a gospel choir, or sitting quietly on the couch at home absorbed in a craft project, these creative times can give us a sense of coming home to ourselves, feeling deeply content.

Like mindfulness, creativity helps us feel present in the here and now, less caught up in ruminative thinking. Some people describe their creative times as a form of mindfulness – it is their opportunity to ‘simply be’. And as with meditation, starting out in a new creative endeavour can be difficult if we approach it with unrealistic expectations. Here are a few suggestions if you’d like to have more creativity in your life, and it feels a bit daunting:

Start small. Instead of planning to write the first two chapters of a brilliant novel, set the timer and write down whatever comes into your head for ten to thirty minutes. If you do this regularly, you will begin to hear your voice in the writing, and it will start to take shape.

Be inspired by children and enjoy your creativity – notice how even a few minutes of drawing or dancing can help you feel re-energised.

Sometimes, constraints are good. Drawing a circle on a blank page could be the start of a mandala, which can be easier than being faced with an empty page. And adult colouring-in books have helped a lot of grown-ups get their coloured pencils out again.

Join a group or a class, or find a teacher. Some of my most enjoyable interactions over the years have been with fellow creatives.

There are many ways to be creative. Cooking, woodwork, gardening, pottery, sowing, teaching children using games and stories – creativity is not an end product, but a state of mind.

Mindfulness practice idea:

Set aside a period of time for a creative activity, and consciously bring mindfulness into the experience. Can mindfulness enhance creativity, and creativity enhance mindfulness?

Connecting with nature – Part 2

‘If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.’ Rainer Maria Rilke

Staying close to the small things hardly noticeable – this is one of the gifts of children, to be enraptured just as much by an ant cautiously making its way across a slippery leaf as by a magnificent sunset which lights up the sky. If we try to approach nature from an intellectual level, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Nature exists on scales which can be difficult for us to comprehend. There are the infinitesimal dimensions of the elements which make up a single cell, and then there is the vastness of space which we can’t really understand. Geological time moves over tens of millions of years, and some insects only live for a few hours. There are more microbes in a teaspoon of soil than people on earth. For so many aspects of nature, the human scale is either too large or too small.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why as humans we sometimes want to place ourselves apart from nature, leading to a sense of disconnection. Our education often encourages us to approach life intellectually, trying to make sense of the world through ongoing learning. Yet as Albert Einstein said,

‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.’

Mindfulness can help us to feel more connected by allowing ourselves to simply be present with the experience of being in nature. The Japanese call this shinrin yoku, forest bathing, and they have developed therapeutic ‘forest bathing’ centres where trained guides assist people to be more mindfully present in a forest. We can develop our own ways of ‘forest bathing’ by turning down the volume of our thinking mind, being aware of the vitality of our bodies through our senses, and engaging with our environment with openness and curiosity.

Even ten minutes of being in a natural environment such as a garden or a park can make a positive difference to our sense of wellbeing. Our mind and body will thank us for looking at flowers or trees instead of a screen. As Rabindranath Tagore said,

‘The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.’

Those moments of feeling connected with nature can also become our ‘time enough.’

Mindfulness practice:

For the next week, set the intention to connect every day with nature in a way you hadn’t done before. One day it could be taking notice of any trees in your area, the next listening for the birds, another time going for a walk at lunchtime. Notice each time how this feels.

Anja Tanhane

Connecting with nature – Part 1

‘Komorebi (Japanese)– the interplay of the light and the leaves when sunlight filters through the trees’.

How delightful that the Japanese have a word for the play of sunlight in a forest! Regardless of where we are in the world, when we stand in a forest, the light has a special quality to it. There are also the sounds of nature – complex sounds which our bodies enjoy hearing, unlike the mechanical sounds of much of city life. Trees give out chemicals called phytoncides, which they use to fight of pests and diseases. Just being near trees means we’re also breathing in phytoncides, which has been shown to increase the activity of our natural killer cells in the immune system. Our bodies are biological systems, and for most of our evolution we lived in close connection to the natural world. It makes sense that we find being in nature relaxing and restorative, and through mindfulness we can deepen this experience even further.

One of my favourite mindfulness practices is called ‘walking outside with awareness of the senses.’ I often include it on retreats or in workshops, and it is very simple, but can be quite profound. We simply spend twenty to thirty minutes walking outside by ourselves, tuning into our different senses. We use sight to look at the landscape as a whole, or the softness of the tips of branches against the sky, or the delicate detail of a single leaf. We hear the sounds around us – birds, the wind, sometimes insects, or a falling branch. We notice the ground under our feet as we walk – the softness of grass, the different feel of a path or stones, the way the ground is undulating. At times we may feel a gentle breeze against our face, or the warmth of sunlight on our skin. I invite people to use their sense of touch to explore the different textures of leaves, bark, stones or grass. Smell, of course, is one of our most powerful senses, and highly evocative. When we close our eyes, we may find that our sense of smell is finer, and picks up the scents in the breeze as well as stronger scents like a rose or eucalyptus tree. And sometimes we can also use our sense of taste, if there is something which is safe to eat.

When we walk outside in this way, with a sense of discovery and delight, we notice how rarely we look at something closely, or are really present within it. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it so eloquently:

‘The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.’

Mindfulness practice:

Set aside twenty minutes to practice ‘Walking outside with awareness of the senses.’ It could be in your garden, a park, or out in nature. What do you notice, when you are present in this way?